Vehicle maintenance is an ongoing occurrence for typical vehicles that have a relatively long in-service lifespan and include a large capital investment such that maintenance is preferable over vehicle replacement. Vehicles such as aircraft, maritime vessels, automobiles, and other large investment assemblies routinely undergo maintenance at regular intervals to maintain the vehicles and occasionally upgrade the vehicles with new components to improve vehicle performance.
Part identification for replacement and/or retrofitting a vehicle is often an important task in vehicle maintenance. People often rely on a bill of materials (BOM) to identify parts of a vehicle. However; a BOM may be incomplete or not available for many vehicles. For instance, small batch production vehicles, older vehicles near the end of their in-service lifespan, and/or highly modified vehicles may not have a complete bill of materials. In addition, some vehicles may include a variety of different configurations, where some of the configurations use different parts than other configurations. For example, one vehicle configuration may use one type of propulsion unit while another vehicle configuration may use a second type of propulsion unit. Therefore, knowing the type of vehicle may not enable generation of a BOM without further inspection or data.
Reduction in vehicle maintenance cycle time is particularly important because vehicles are removed from an in-service status when undergoing maintenance, which may result in large amounts of lost profits due to vehicle downtime. Some maintenance time and/or vehicle downtime may be unnecessarily spent identifying parts and then waiting for the parts to arrive when the parts are shipped from remote locations.
In some instances, it may be desirable to modify a vehicle, such as by retrofitting a vehicle with a new technology. For example, some older vehicles may be improved by adding a GPS (global positioning system) unit to assist with navigation. It is helpful to have detailed information about a vehicle prior to installation of new devices, particularly when many vehicles will undergo modification. For example, it may be helpful to identify an installation location of the new devices prior to receipt of the vehicle for maintenance. In addition, it may be helpful to locate power sources, restrictive structures, or other important considerations prior to receipt of the vehicle to enable installation of a new device without excessive service time, and thus reduce the downtime of the vehicle.